Beautiful World, Where Are You?

The 2018 Liverpool Biennial does a thing well that most biennials claim to do, but never seem to achieve: it brings local and international artists into a meaningful conversation with the local context. For this 10th anniversary edition, titled “Beautiful world, where are you?” director Sally Tallant enlisted veteran curator Kitty Scott, with whom she worked at Serpentine Galleries in London. Tallant, who has run the biennial since 2012, and Scott, who has put together important exhibitions for the Banff Centre and Documenta 13, and is currently Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, engaged 40 artists from 22 countries and rooted the exhibition in the community with residencies and artists projects.

“It is through arts and culture that we express our hopes and fears and articulate alternatives and new possible worlds,” Tallant said during the press opening last week. The invited artists were asked to “reflect on the question ‘Beautiful world, where are you?’ focusing on these pressing issues: inequality, conservation, extinction, education, resource extraction, Indigeneity, post-colonialism. Within its public spaces, galleries, museums and civic buildings the city of Liverpool provides the setting.”

A working-class city in the north west of England, that was at one time one of the most affluent cities in Britain, sustained by the cotton, tobacco, sugar and slavery industries, Liverpool experienced a sharp economic downturn in recent decades, making it a site rife with the contradictions, complications and possibilities of the present day.

The well-integrated urban spread of the partner venues asks visitors to move through different areas of the city, and in this way enter into local spaces that may not be art-related, but contain some aspect of Liverpool’s unique history and culture. You walk along the docks, past the Merseyside Maritime Museum, to arrive at Tate Liverpool, for instance. You go into the courtrooms and underground prison chambers of St. George’s Hall to see discreet film installations; you walk by the city’s massive Oratory to see a film projected in the interior of its stone abbey; you pass through a university courtyard to see special exhibitions; and venture to the historically Black Grandby neighbourhood to enter a collaborative garden installation. In this way, the biennial shapes and engages new audiences: not only just art-minded visitors, but also locals going about their everyday.

Standout examples of well-integrated projects include British artist Ryan Gander’s Time Moves Quickly, a collaboration with five local schoolchildren that yielded a public sculpture installation at Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral. Likewise, French-Algerian artist Mohamed Bourouissa—along with a presentation of his 2013 film Horse Day, about the Black horse-riders of the Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club in Baltimore—worked with a local community to build Resilience Garden, a permanent community garden built in partnership with students and teachers at the Kingsley Community School. Bouroussia worked closely with Bouriem Mohamed, a patient at the the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital, where, at one time, the psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon used gardening as a form of therapy. Together they designed the layout of the Liverpool community garden, later populated with a cross-section of plants that are connected to Britain, Algeria and the moving horticultural histories of colonialism. The garden is intended to remain in place, and be managed indefinitely by the local community.

Scott also introduced several Canadian artists to the biennial. Brian Jungen, Duane Linklater, Annie Pootoogook and Joyce Wieland present drawing, film and sculptural works at Tate Liverpool. A large selection of Pootoogook’s pencil drawings, many familiar to Canadian audiences from her recent McMichael Canadian Art Collection exhibition “Cutting Ice,” present stunning, humourous and profound social commentary in colourful and poignant depictions of contemporary Inuit life. Also shown at the Tate was Joyce Weiland’s Rat life and diet in North America (1968), made during the height of the Vietnam War, depicting a political allegory told via the live-action adventure of a group of gerbils who escape the United States for organic farming in Canada.

At St. George’s Hall, a neoclassical law court and prison that dates back to the mid-19th century, Weiland’s work Sailboat (1967) was projected in a corridor over an underground bridge. Nearby was Jungen and Linklater’s film project, Modest livelihood (2012), which follows the artists on two hunts in Dana-zaa Territory in northern British Columbia. Mesmerizing in its banality, the silent, 50-minute film captivates the viewer with sustained, unspectacular scenes ambient with the expectation of the hunt. Jungen, Linklater and Weiland had works in several venues, as did many artists in the biennial. In this way, the organizers created subtle lateral networks of exhibition.

One recurring comment about the biennial—which boasts 53 per cent women artists participating—is that it is understated. This may or may not be a result of the exhibition’s feminist organizing, but it is experienced by the many paths for walking across the city to exhibition venues. Unlike extravagant displays sometimes seen in other biennials, the works, as well as the way in which they are distributed among venues, allow for discreet, repeated and surprising encounters that are neither planned nor ostentatious.